I told D26 that if she’s able to snag one of the fed government’s Scholarship For Service awards (which pays for full cost of attendance for 2-3 yr in exchange for working for a federal agency for an equal amt of time), we will buy her a new car. Like “new” as in “not pre-owned/used” car. 
The Scholarship For Service options at the different colleges we’ve researched is one of a couple of big factors driving D26’s college search.
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I mean, it is funny! Interesting that your D26 also nixed Bryn Mawr but not Haverford for petty reasons. I have to let my wife try to do the convincing, if I try it will almost guarantee Bryn Mawr stays in the no category. We may also chat with D26s college counselor because she listens to her it seems (that’s where she got the idea to check out Agnes Scott).
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We gave D19 this option, with the luxury (thanks to the markets) of a fully funded 529. She chose to go for her reach, where she (and most people) had no chance at merit. ( She went ED, so nothing to compare to, other than a $10k/year offer from a school where the application withdrawal didn’t go through. She didn’t seem to have regrets.)
C26 will get the same option. If their #1 school comes off, yet again it is a school that gives little to no merit. Ah well…If they end up at their (current) safety, the calculator indicates something like $17k merit a year. (Of course, by “give” I mean set aside in an account for when they graduate.)
My understanding is that if you get a scholarship you can withdraw the equivalent amount from the 529 without the penalty, but of course you are liable for taxes in that instance.
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I was listening an audiobook driving back from SLO yesterday (architecture workshop finished!) and sometime tangential to this came up - where part of being able to defer in favor of a greater payoff is linked to age. The cases they were talking about were much younger but I don’t think it’s irrelevant at this age either: I know D19, for example, would at least consider this differently now - I’m not sure she would have changed her mind but the thought process would likely be different.
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We got the senior picture signup email this week, too. Starting August 11. Between that at the college essay work, it seems we really are here! Deep breath…
S26 has a working list of schools to apply to. We have managed to see 17 schools and I don’t want to see another one until we are picking the one he’s going to in the spring.
LACs are out. Medium sized to huge universities are in. (LACs are high school 2.0 in his eyes, and I get it, but I do love a LAC!) He is going to shoot his shot at an Ivy ED, deciding between Dartmouth and Columbia.
These are obviously polar opposites as far experiences go but they make sense to him. He wants to study philosophy and math, with studio art somewhere in the mix. Philosophy at Columbia is very embedded into their Core, which is full of things he’s excited to read and talk about. He loves NYC (born there) but loves how Columbia is tucked way uptown and feels like its own universe. And Dartmouth is its own universe, appealing to the forest-loving rock climber in him, with a strong math program and a philosophy program that’s more analytical. He also craves a fun college social life, so Dartmouth appeals there too. It also has a bunch of grad schools so to him it feels bigger than a LAC.
His other top choices that he has seen in person are University of Washington, Boston University, Northeastern (the latter two offer a Philosophy and Math combined major). He also liked University of Vermont and Burlington. We didn’t get a tour at NYU since they are booked out for the summer, but we walked around and he liked it. They have a very good philosophy department and math is strong too. I’m not sure he will do ED2, because he loves Washington and may want to wait for it.
He will round out the OOS public list with Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon, Boulder, Pitt and probably Michigan. And he will apply to a few UCs (in-state for us)… Berkeley, LA, Davis, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz. We are still looking at Rochester, Syracuse, Cornell.
That’s about 13 schools plus the UCs (which I count as a single app). Maybe 16 if he adds the others. His safeties are Vermont, Boulder, Minnesota, Oregon.
Overall, he’s excited about a biggish to bigger school in a city or college town, cold weather/seasons, liberal state/city. Dartmouth is an outlier in size and location but he seems smitten by it.
Now… if we could only get the essays going…
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Those are some diverse schools! Great list! Love that he’s willing to look on both coasts – mine isn’t as adventurous and is sticking closer to home. My kid also shunned LACs (after I really thought she’d feel “cozy” and comfortable at one) – for the exact same reason, she doesn’t want high school 2.0.
D26 finished a draft of the main common app essay and sent it to her counselor, who responded with some really good suggestions, but it means she’ll need to rework the entire ending, and she’s dragging her feet. She’s finding the self-reflection part difficult – her essay conveys her values of creativity and persistence and diligence, but why are those her values, the counselor asked. She has no idea, LOL.
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Amazing that she has a solid draft! And while I get why her counselor might ask for more evidence to support her values, I agree it’s a hard question to answer. Is there anything in her intro that she can call back to, to stitch it together?
D26 has a draft… but she wants to go back to the drawing board and start over again because she feels her draft doesn’t really represent her.
S23 was a lot easier to coach through this process because he was happy with pretty much any okay looking essay and just wanted to submit 
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Her essay is a bunch of vignettes of her various creative pursuits from the time she was really young – mixing “potions” of shampoo/bodywash/toothpaste and hiding them under her bathroom sink, folding a giant origami wolf for an elementary school talent show (complete with background music and tiny origami wolves thrown into the crowd, lol), creating swords out of hoarded toilet paper tubes, etc. And then she touches on crochet, sewing, making doll clothes, cosplay, etc.
There are a lot of funny bits about how she usually had a vision that her parents were just not seeing, LOL.
The meat of it describes two high school activities – starting a painting club at school, and what she did when it went awry, and then creating an entire prom dress out of duct tape for Duck brand’s Stuck At Prom scholarship competition.
She kind of runs out of room in her conclusion, although she does tie it back to still being the kid who wants to secretly mix potions just to see what would happen.
The counselor suggested that the painting club and duct tape stories were maybe best left to the activities section, as she thought they didn’t fit the tone of the essay – more telling than showing. And she suggested a lot more self-reflection at the end, like okay, you’re clearly this quirky and creative kid that does all this stuff, but why is it important to you?
I have a background in journalism/editing, and I can SEE the potential for how the finished essay could be really good. Unfortunately it’s going to take some deep digging for my kid to get there, and I am sitting on my hands and keeping my mouth shut so I don’t influence her too much – I want it to come from her!
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It sounds like a really great essay—and I hear you on needing to sit on your hands! I will have to do the same. My S26 has an idea and it’s interesting… but he too will struggle with the self reflection. When we have talked about it, he’s like “I don’t know! It’s just what I do!”
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My kid’s (at least for now) is not totally dissimilar- I’m hoping they will tie in well that the various things they do (and have always done) for fun actually align with their academic interests. But…essay is slow. Kid is exhausted after 4 weeks of 9am-4pm studio Monday-Saturday so I’m letting them just chill and veg this weekend before nagging about the essay.
On another issue, does anyone know if most colleges allow non-music students any access to pianos/keybaords? I don’t think taking our clavinova to college is practical even if it’s allowed (there are headphones,but it takes up space, and D19 might get annoyed if it’s not there when she comes home!), but C26 loves relaxing by playing /composing, and I’m not sure this angle is something they’ve thought of. This occurred to me randomly when I saw that their tiny house model had a tiny piano in it (“because it’s my house, of course there’s a piano”).
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This was a column in S23’s spreadsheet and it’s a column in D26’s as well. Practice room access for non-majors varies by college, and you just have to dig around for the info. Likewise with music lessons for non-majors, ensembles, etc.
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Yup, we looked into ensembles as that is also a thing for them but I didn’t think of that. Will add column!
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I don’t know, but surely there is a way to sign up for practice room slots? D22’s dorm building has a soundproof practice room with several instruments that she has used to rehearse for auditions, etc. I think it’s first come, first served. I don’t know what the policy is at the actual musical school, though.
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Not at all colleges and universities. Many reserve them for only music majors.
As an example (and because your name here is SpreadsheetMom) here is a section of S23’s spreadsheet page on music access for non-majors. You can see how important this was for him. Then he had a column in his main spreadsheet with the “summary” for each school. This was from a few years ago, of course, so the info isn’t current now (and he had a lot more schools on there too, this is just a screenshot of some of them).
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Ah, 1st choice college has a couple of first come first served practice rooms open to anyone at the college, as well as a number more open to non-music majors taking classes in the music college. That was an easy Google search, why didn’t I think of it 
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This made me nostalgic and a sign of changing times. In the dark ages, I was an engineering student taking piano lessons at Virginia tech. My professor gave me a key to her office in this building so I could practice on her grand piano. My sister was a piano performance music major at the time, which likely helped just a tad.
But I recently threw out a ton of old keys that I had no idea what they went to. Not that it would have still worked, but it was cool that I had keys to the building below! It sits across from McBryde. I kick myself for not keeping track of that one, but at the time I didn’t think twice about it.
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D26 had a great week at her summer nursing academy. She is now 100% sure nursing is what she wants and she even decided she wants NICU based on the hospital unit tours she got to do. She is so excited! I am relieved it was a good week for her as you never know how these things can go. It was residential in a non air-conditioned dorm and it was around 100 with the heat index most of the week. That was the only “negative” of her week.
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I do appreciate a good spreadsheet! 
We did something similar for D22 because being able to join a choir of some kind was imperative – but she wasn’t worried about voice lessons, and to be honest, we didn’t think of practice rooms at the time. (She had played piano for 13 years but was burned out and needed a break.)
Same with D26 and marching band (and the right kind of marching band) or at least pep band. This has been surprisingly limiting in her college search, actually.
This is so great that she’s finding her path! I think we ask a lot of kids this age to figure out their lives – but it’s pretty awesome when they get confirmation that they’re headed in the right direction. 
It’s funny, my D22 is a linguistics major, and she’s been considering whether she wants to go to grad school for speech language pathology. She did a full day shadowing an SLP in the hospital who was working with babies that had feeding/swallowing problems. My kid, who had never so much as held an infant, was fascinated – and then she determined that it definitely wasn’t the path for her, LOL. (She’d rather work with school-aged kids who have language difficulties, which is more her wheelhouse.)
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